Friday, January 24, 2014

Telstra and Telkom Indonesia will form a new joint venture to provide network services in South East Asia.

The proposed joint venture will be the exclusive provider of Network Applications and Services (NAS) in Indonesia for Telstra and Telkom Indonesia giving both companies the opportunity to build market share in the fast growing NAS market in the region. Specifically, the JV would deliver enterprise and business customers with managed network and security services as well as cloud and unified communications services.
Telstra said the deal will further its expansion plans for Asia, which includes both Telstra entities and local market partnerships.

Telkom Indonesia's Group Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer and Pak Indra Utoyo said: "We are bringing the proven ICT NAS solutions to Indonesia to assist businesses to be more productive and competitive to support them locally and into the region."

Iterchange Limited, a Vanuatu-based company, is expanding its undersea infrastructure with a new cable system spanning more than 3000km that will link the Pacific islands of Vanuatu, the Solomons and Papua New Guinea. The new system, which will use Alcatel-Lucent’s submarine systems, will connect Port Vila, Vanuatu, to Port Moresby, PNG, with branches to Luganville, Vanuatu, and Honiara in the Solomon islands. The cable will initially operate at 40 Gbps and offer a design capacity of 1.2 Tbps.

Simon Fletcher, CEO of Interchange, said: ”Fast and easy connections to everything and all the time is a critical demand whether it comes from video entertainment, cloud-based business applications or access to more basic health care applications from remote areas. With the help of Alcatel-Lucent’s submarine technology, this new undersea cable system further help remove the current dependence on satellite and further encourage the introduction of new services and applications affordably available to everyone. Interchange is committed to a better future for Melanesia by offering nation-building telecommunications technologies and infrastructure to communities throughout the entire region.”

This new system will complement the 1,259km external linkVanuatu-Fiji undersea cable system, Vanuatu’s first international submarine cable link between Port Vila and Suva in Fiji that will commence commercial operation this month.

Telstra has successfully test APT700 (Asia-Pacific Telecommunity 700MHz) spectrum using Ericsson’s new APT700 radio equipment. This marks another important milestone in the introduction of new low band LTE frequencies and the development of the LTE ecosystem.

The first call on 700MHz was made on Telstra’s live network across two test sites in a regional location in Australia using a pre-release smartphone.

Mike Wright, Telstra Executive Director Networks, said: "This band of spectrum allows us to build the next generation of mobile services. Through this testing we are keen to understand how the network works with the 700 MHz spectrum, how commercial devices interact with the network and how we will be able to achieve faster speeds, more capacity and wider 4G coverage."

Håkan Eriksson, CEO Ericsson Australia and New Zealand, said: "This is the latest in a number of successful technology trials undertaken with Telstra aimed at readying the operator’s network for the release of APT700 digital dividend."

"The APT700 band has the ability to provide excellent in-building coverage as well as delivering wide area coverage in regional and rural areas, providing operators with increased capacity and performance, and users with a superior experience," Eriksson added.

BT will invest a further £50 million into its commercial fibre broadband programme over the next three years. The funds, which are in addition to the more than £3 billion already committed to deploying fibre broadband , will benefit more than 30 cities, helping to make high speed broadband available to more than 400,000 additional premises.

Mike Galvin, MD Network Investment at Openreach said: “Our fibre programme is going extremely well with our engineers connecting homes and businesses across the UK. Some city areas have proved challenging in the past but we are returning to those and will pass hundreds of thousands of additional premises with fibre.

“We are reaching vast swathes of rural Britain with our public sector partners but we will upgrade these city areas under our own steam. Businesses in cities already have access to ultra-fast speeds but fibre will give them greater choice. The UK is already ahead of its main European rivals when it comes to fibre, and is set to race ahead thanks to the BDUK plans that are already in progress across the country.”

BT’s new investment will focus on three areas:

Enabling city cabinets that weren’t part of BT’s original commercial plans due to technical challenges or local planning restrictions

Deploying fibre to cabinets to serve multi-dwelling units such as apartment blocks

Laying further fibre – including ‘Fibre-to-the-Premises’ technology – to new build sites in cities.

Bashinformsvyaz JSC, one of the largest service providers in the Urals region and in Russia at large, has deployed the Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Transport Platform (MSTP) and Cisco ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers in key traffic nodes.

As a result, new coherent transponders were installed on DWDM-network multiplexors, ensuring data transmission at the rate of 100 gigabits per second per wavelength. Cisco said this type of transponder features a 100 Gigabit Ethernet client interface for user equipment; it is capable of transmitting data at a distance up to 4,000 km without intermediate Optical-to-Electronic-to-Optical regeneration. Along with the above, Cisco ASR 9000 routers were upgraded with line cards featuring 100 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces; these were connected to 100 Gbps DWDM transponders. This allowed building a high-speed trunk line scalable to 4 Tbps, connecting major cities of the Republic of Bashkortostan. Additionally, traffic grooming and optimization have been performed to enable more efficient utilization of the existing infrastructure; due to deep integration of IP and optical levels, reliability and survivability of the company's backbone network were dramatically increased.

"Upgrade of the backbone network segment to 100 Gbps helps ensure a huge margin of safety, and efficient and scalable data transport infrastructure required to maintain further network growth and telecom services development within this area. It is very important to notice that implementation of 100 Gbps channels did not require any alterations of the existing DWDM network built some years ago for 10 Gbps speed capacity; our engineer staff was directly involved in those works. This allowed minimizing the deadlines and costs, completing works without interfering with existing services, as well as enriching ourselves with this precious experience of such a large-scale project,” stated Rustam Yanyshev, first deputy general director, CTO, Bashinformsvyaz.

At a meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, Cisco CEO John Chambers confirmed plans to expand Cisco's presence in Mexico, including the recently announced Cisco Support Center, the expansion of manufacturing of advanced technology products, and the expansion of the Cisco Networking Academy program. Cisco anticipates direct and indirect investment of up to US $1.35 billion during 2014.

Cisco will expand sourcing of advanced technology products in Mexico through world-class contract manufacturers. Additionally, the investment will cover the recently announced Cisco Support Center (CSC) in Mexico City, which will support local and regional operations and create the capacity to service customers in the Spanish language.

Cisco is also expanding its Networking Academy program to help Mexico increase the pool of high skills workers required to support Mexico's growing technology sector. Cisco Networking Academy in Mexico is one of the largest programs for Cisco worldwide, with more than 50,000 students enrolled in 300 academies nationwide. The Networking Academy is a cloud-delivered, scalable, high-quality program that helps students develop the practical skills needed to design, build, secure and maintain computer networks.

Cisco started operations in Mexico in 1993; it has more than 600 employees working on sales, services and support in offices in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey, and in Cd. Juarez focused on Cisco manufacturing operations. Business partners employs over 5800 Mexicans dedicated to Cisco production.